I have reported from Asia since covering the "Year of Living Dangerously" in Indonesia, 1965-66, and the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the late 1960s-early 1970s for newspapers and magazines, including the Chicago Tribune and the old Washington (DC) Star. I also wrote two books from that period, "Wider War: the Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos" and "Tell it to the Dead." In recent years I've reported from Korea for the Christian Science Monitor, International Herald Tribune, Forbes Asia, etc. while writing "Korean Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju-yung," "Korea Betrayed: Kim Dae-jung and Sunshine" and, in 2013, "Okinawa and Jeju: Bases of Discontent." I've also reported a lot from Japan, the Philippines and Iraq and spent much of 2013 as a Fulbright-Nehru senior research scholar in India.

North Korea's War Of Words

Word that North Korea’s got new missile launchers on its east coast shows the fragility of the standoff on the Korean peninsula. No, no one thinks the North Koreans are about to fire on a “live” target — whether U.S. bases in Japan or South Korea or at some more distant target. The fact is, however, the ongoing moves orchestrated by the North Korean ruling elite in the name of the young leader Kim Jong-un show the unlikelihood if not the impossibility of arriving gracefully at a conclusion to the standoff.

The threat is not going away in negotiations in the immediate future. North Korea has several important dates to consider. First, U.S. and South Korean joint exercises wind down at the end of the month, and then South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye takes off for Washington for a summit with President Obama in early May. Then there’s the 60th anniversary in July of the signing of the truce that ended the Korean War. North Korea has often called for a peace treaty in place of the armistice, which it claims to have abrogated, but that’s only a ruse to get U.S. troops to abandon the South. Any peace treaty would have to come with the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea. North Korea would go on claiming the U.S. had nuclear warheads poised in Asia, at bases in Japan or on ships at sea. Given the obvious nature of North Korea’s strategy, the U.S. should rebuff all demands for such a treaty.

North Korea will raise the pressure for a treaty, emitting threats and possibly perpetrating “incidents” that North Korean strategists believe will force the U.S. to cave. The North Korean strategy is both smart and dumb. It’s smart in the sense that U.S. negotiators have a long record of finally giving in to North Korea and saying, Ok, let’s give it a try. That was certainly the case when the former U.S. envoy, Christopher Hill, in September 2005 signed on to a piece of paper that marked the beginning of endless rounds of talks culminating in the signing in 2007 of two agreements under which North Korea seemed to have assented to quite a specific schedule for abandoning its nuclear program.

North Korea stood to gain a lot of economic bennies from this deal. The deal seemed all the more incredible since North Korea in 2002 was shown to have grossly violated the Geneva framework agreement of October 1994 under which the North would have gotten twin light-water nuclear energy reactors in return for shutting down its nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Instead, eight years later, the North was discovered to have been running an entirely separate program for develop warheads with highly enriched uranium.

After years of loud denials, North Korea now is loudly stating that it will never give up its nukes, that the nuclear issue is non-negotiable and that nuclear hell awaits its enemies. What North Korea really wants is for the UN to give up the stiffened sanctions imposed after the North’s third nuclear test on February 12. Apparently these sanctions are really hurting more than previous sanctions imposed after the first and second nuclear tests in October 2006 and May 2009.

The great drama goes on. We can only hope it remains a war of words, harsh and unsettling though it may be, and does not slip into the “war” that North Korea claims is already boiling on the Korean peninsula. Certainly, in Seoul, there’s no sign of war — or even concern that a war might be on the verge of happening. Let us hope the South Koreans are right in their assessment of the threat from above the demilitarized zone.

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The shutdown of the Kaesong Industrial Complex carries disturbing implications that may have been overlooked. In the decades before the complex was built, area was a military base for North Korean forces. North Korean military people were said to have been unhappy with the transition of the area to an industrial zone for South Korean companies. Now they can position forces more easily unobserved to positions surrounding the zone. They could even occupy some of the space taken by South Korean companies. Yet another disturbing implication is the possibility of using the seven South Koreans left behind to settle final accounts. The North and South sides are known to disagree on some of the financial issues. Might these last few South Korean managers be held as de facto hostages while the two sides haggle over how much the South owes? The bargaining is not made easier by the refusal of the North to agree on formal negotiations with the South over the zone and its future.